R.E. Stearns's Blog, page 2

Happy Book Birthday to Gravity of a Distant Sun!

As of today, everyone can read Gravity of a Distant Sun in print and audio formats. I posted some spoilers in last month's blog post if you're still deciding whether to read it.

It's always bittersweet when one comes to the end of a story one loves. This is the longest I've ever stuck around with the same set of characters. I know more about Adda and Iridian than I know about some of my cousins, and I’m fond of the universe they live in. Things don’t work out well for everyone in it, but it’s got a lot of advantages over ours.

This trilogy has introduced me to lovely readers I never would’ve met just wandering the halls of the local sci-fi conventions, resources like the Illustrated Page’s Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Database that I now use whenever I’m looking for my next evening read, and other authors who… Probably wish they hadn’t met me. I’m about as good as Adda with in-person socialization. This trilogy has been a hell of a ride. I appreciate everyone who made it possible and came along with me.

I’m curious to see what you think of the end of Iridian’s and Adda’s story! Feel free to review Gravity of a Distant Sun wherever you find it, and drop a note on my contact page if you like.

Gravity of a Distant Sun is Out in ONE MONTH!

Gravity of a Distant Sun is just a month away! Its release date remains February 18, 2020, and you can pre-order the paper and ebook editions pretty much anywhere. I’m pleased to report that the audiobook page is up on the Recorded Books website, including a neat cover with a space station orbiting Jupiter. Look for it at your favorite audiobook retailer soon, and feel free to remind your local library that it’s coming in audio format as well as print and ebook.

If you’re just hearing about this trilogy now, or you’ve been waiting until the last book is out to start, here’s a quick summary: Girlfriends set out to join a space pirate crew and get more than they planned for when a trio of powerful AIs take an interest in them. I like plotting and having things actually happen in my stories, so that’s a vast simplification, but that’s basically what happens.

And now, because there are some unfortunate tropes associated with stories starring wlw characters, here are some SPOILERS which may help you decide whether to read this book or this series. If you want to avoid the SPOILERS, skip to the < /SPOILERS > section at the bottom of this post.

Adda and Iridian start the story physically separated, but they get back together in the middle.
Adda and Iridian live through the whole story. Neither one dies. As far as I’m concerned, they’re immortal.
None of the non-straight characters suddenly discover they're straight for some reason.

< /SPOILERS >

I hope you love this conclusion to the Shieldrunner Pirates trilogy. With luck, I’ll have an announcement about an entirely new novel sometime this year!

A New Novella from R. E. Stearns

Happiest possible holidays! To celebrate and/or escape, a new novella from the Shieldrunner Pirates universe is now available! It’s called Six Lost Souls. You don’t have to know anything about the Shieldrunner Pirates universe to enjoy it, although those who’ve read the trilogy might appreciate a glimpse of life on Ceres before the war.

In this hardboiled science fiction novella set before the events of the Shieldrunner Pirates trilogy, Ku Nel-Aoki sets out to learn why a colony ship is still docked after refueling. The reason turns Ku’s comfortable life of crime upside down. A member of the organized crime group known as the Ceres syndicate has gotten arrested and the entire neighborhood’s police force has been replaced. Ku’s syndicate boss drops the whole mess in her lap. Now Ku has to clean it up before stationsec finds a reason to put her in a cell too, or her boss gets impatient and kills everyone involved.

You can read an excerpt, and if you like it you can acquire the ebook of Six Lost Souls at these lovely locations:

Smashwords (EPUB, MOBI/Kindle, PDF, and LRF formats)
Amazon (MOBI/Kindle format)
Barnes & Noble (NOOK format)
Kobo.com (Kobo format)

Eventually it should show up in Overdrive, so you can check it out from your local library, and various other ebook vendors. If this novella gains at least 50 reviews at a major retailer like Amazon or Smashwords, then I’ll record an audiobook of it as well. Regardless, I will record audio for this blog post at some point in the future.

Gravity of a Distant Sun, the final book in the Shieldrunner Pirates trilogy, is still scheduled to be released in February 2020, and it’s available for pre-order in your favorite bookstore now.

A Question for YOU

Gravity of a Distant Sun is making occasional appearances on Amazon's Hot New LGBT Action & Adventure list, which is fun. If you've preordered the novel and you want a thank-you postcard, feel free to use my website's contact page or a form of social media (see the icons at the bottom of any page on my website) to tell me your mailing address.

In lieu of a long post, because November is a busy time for us all, I’m asking a question:

Would you read a novella (20,000 words or 65ish pages) set in the Shieldrunner Pirates universe with a new queer protagonist? *


Yes

No

Maybe






























If you'd like to share more details about your answer, do so here:

Thank you for telling me your interest level in a Shieldrunner Pirates novella. Your input will help me decide whether and how to publish one.

Best of luck during the holiday season! The new year, and Gravity of a Distant Sun, will be here before you know it.

Fall Discoveries

Hello from the far side of a new story draft! I've answered some interview questions at NFReads.com, including a few ideas on title selection, which is usually an ordeal for me. Fortunately, Gravity of a Distant Sun is a pretty great title. Just about four months to go until you get to read the story it represents.

If you like signed paper science fiction books, check out the Barnes and Nobles around the Seattle airport. The one I visited this week had a lot of signed Greg Bear books on the shelves, among others. Now it also has a signed copy of Barbary Station!

For more to read and view, I've found the following while researching the next story:

Lab lit is a thing! It's fiction about science as a profession. Lablit.com offers a list of examples categorized by tone (humor, drama, etc.), which I wish more story descriptions would do.
Cleaning up meth labs appears to be a massive undertaking, according to the 12-step process in Restoration & Remediation Magazine's website.
Aircrete dome homes are adorable and they look like they belong in a video game.
Sleep studies require more wires than I expected, as demonstrated in this YouTube video on the subject.

Happy Halloween to all and especially the uncounted sundry, and good luck in NaNoWriMo in November!

Three Things Writers Can Learn from Visual Art

The Nan Desu Kan art show is always a lot of fun work, and it has come and gone once more. In addition to the wall art I bought (I can support other artists! Thank you, readers.), here are a few writer takeaways from the show:

Expand your definition of art.

Although paintings and drawings are the most common art forms at the show, this year fabulous artists also brought us a spooky hand-bound book, cross-stitches, masks, jewelry, and even a bronze bust of an artist’s face with elf ears! This should remind writers that our stories don’t have to look, read, or otherwise resemble other people’s stories. Our stories need not handle edifying topics or meet strangers’ subjective purity criteria.

It’s art. You’re an artist and writer, even if all you’ve written is a drabble published in the Hugo-award-winning Archive of Our Own. We can’t let convention hold us back from telling our stories the way we want to tell them. Unless, of course, we really need the money, because capitalism.

Your creation can make people happy without being technically perfect or on theme.

One of the pieces on display at the art show this year was a detailed color drawing of Raven from Teen Titans. That’s not anime or a Japanese video game (which was this year’s con theme), although it’s anime-adjacent. The pose and facial expression were wonderful, and the technique was a little flat and amateur, especially compared to some art displayed nearby.

When Teen Titans fans walked by, every one of them stopped to oo and ahh over Raven “living her best life.” They were so happy to see her. The technically superior work next to that piece didn’t move them at all.

This serves as a writerly reminder to follow your instincts. Make something you love, and someone else will love it too. You’ll make more people happy if you edit it and bring it closer to your vision, but the story doesn’t have to be structurally immaculate. It doesn’t have to fit a trend. It just needs to say something you mean, no more, no less.

Many factors affecting sales and awards are outside your control.

Art and writing don’t need to be competitive, but when an award is involved, someone wins, others don’t. This year, the piece that won Best in Show got exceptional promotion from the staff, because it was unique art that evoked immense curiosity and emotional reaction. Nobody else who entered art into the show this year would’ve known that that piece of art would be present, and if they did, they couldn’t (well, shouldn’t) have done anything about it.

That artist didn’t make the award-winning piece to win. They made it because they enjoyed making it. In fact, as soon as the awards were given out, the Best in Show artist removed the price from the piece. Because they marked the winning piece as “not for sale,” any money that would’ve been spent on it could be spent on other art instead. The other artists in the show couldn’t do anything about that, either!

Another potential factor affecting art sales this year was that the convention had to take place a week before it usually did. Maybe we had a slightly different crowd. Maybe people attending this year were saving money to spend on Dragon Con in Atlanta, since attending both cons was possible for a change. Maybe people who would’ve usually been out of money after a long weekend had extra spending money. The artists in the art show couldn’t change the con date. All they could do – all any of us can do – was make the coolest stuff they could and put it out in the world for other people to enjoy.

In related news, the cover of Gravity of a Distant Sun has been revealed on the B&N Sci-Fi Fantasy Blog, and it is glorious! Also, I’m looking forward to attending Sirens in October. If you see a fat redhead with my name on her nametag, feel free to say hi!

Further Reading

Callahan, T. (2018, September 15). Train your eye for better writing: 3 writing techniques adapted from the visual arts. Retrieved from WritersDigest.com
Digriz, D. (2019, April 25). What literary artists can learn from visual artists. Retrieved from clarkhulingsfund.org
Hotchkiss, S. (2018). How to write an artist statement. Retrieved from TheCreativeIndependent.com

Conventions and Solar Sailing

First, the Shieldrunner news: Barnes & Noble's Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog has included our heroines in a fabulous list of "The Best Ragtag Crews in Space Opera," which I believe is relevant to all our interests. Also, I have seen Gravity of a Distant Sun's cover and it is beautiful. If it turns up online anytime soon, I'll point you to it.

The anime convention I volunteer in, Nan Desu Kan, is happening August 23-25. Please maintain control of your tails, wings, skirts, weapons, and children while viewing the art at the art show. Con guests include Ray Chase and Robbie Daymond, whose voices you've almost certainly heard in one thing or another, and Pannon of the podcast "Cosplay Stitch and Seam." I will attempt to update my profile photos before the con but I'm not at all sure I'll manage it, so prepare for an older, frecklier, redder version of me than you see online. If you miss me at the NDK art show, I'll be attending Sirens in October.

My online discoveries of the month include:

Ecosia, a search engine that uses ad dollars to plant trees. Ecosia's search results are from Bing, Microsoft's search engine, so they're not bad. I'm willing to sacrifice some anonymity to let a website tell me how many trees my ridiculous queries are getting planted.

Janelle Shane, one of the funniest people on the internet (with some help from her nerural networks), has a book coming out in November 2019! Read her announcement to learn more about her AI-titled book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. If you've never visited AIweirdness.com before, you must check it out. The candy heart messages written by a neural network are classic, but the neural-network-generated Harry Potter spells and thesis titles are also hilarious.

And finally, LightSail 2 is a whole-ass spacecraft orbiting Earth under solar power, as sci-fi foretold. Solar sailing is real!

Gravity of a Distant Sun is Available for Pre-Order!

Good news, everyone! The third Shieldrunner Pirates book, Gravity of a Distant Sun, is available for pre-order now, through IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Amazon! You can also ask your local library to pre-order a copy for you. The prospective release date is February 18, 2020.

I spent Pride month revising sapphic spacefarer stories, so a couple of those are out on submission now. With luck, you'll read them sometime in the next year or two. If you preorder Gravity of a Distant Sun, you'll make those new stories more likely to be published, because that's how publishing works! Therefore...

Before Gravity of a Distant Sun comes out, use my site's contact box (or DM me on social media, if that's a thing you can do) to tell me you pre-ordered it, and include your mailing address in that message. I'll send a thank-you postcard.

While you're waiting for February and thank-you postcards, you can kill time by checking out this charming short film on YouTube called ITD. If you don't speak Swedish, enjoy the tense Ola Strandh score, because there are no subtitles. Don't worry, you won't get lost. It's helpful to know that the protagonists are a very well armed maintenance crew. The filmmakers spent the special effects budget where it belonged: on the killer robots! The esthetics are wonderful.

May Updates and Interesting Links

Good news! Shieldrunner Pirates book three cover design has begun! I’ll post a link here if there’s a reveal post. If the publisher gets Martin Deschambault to come back for the third book, it will be gorgeous. Even if they don’t, yay, new space art!

And now, here are some fabulous things I learned about while working on a new project:

Surtshellir is a very cool lava tube cave in Iceland. Some of its mythology figures into A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie, a short story by Sonya Taaffe. Unfortunately, jerks found the cave in the 1910s and broke a bunch of the lava formations, so it’s not what it was. I am Library of Alexandria levels of mad about it. It’s still pretty cool and you can visit, but you’d better not break anything in there. Also, those ridges on lava tube walls are called step marks, and they show where the lava paused on its passage through the earth!

Non-equatorial space elevators are totally possible and they have some advantages over the equatorial kind.

SlimWiki lets you create your own wiki and it works like it looks like it will. I’m trying it out as a story bible for the new project. The Shieldrunner Pirates story bible is in Tiddlywiki, which I chose because it allows you to work offline and I used to travel a lot. The card system is kind of novel, but it's unwieldly and tends not to do what I want it to do. Copying the basic wiki structure from an old project to a new one is, so far as I can tell, not possible in Tiddlywiki with my knowledge of coding. I have high hopes for SlimWiki.

If you never visit my website, for which I don’t blame you, you might not know that I’m on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest as RE_Stearns. I post infrequently, but I hear from y’all on Twitter from to time and that’s… The best part of Twitter.

Late post-audio addition: Support striking Uber and Lyft drivers on Wednesday, May 8 by finding some other way to travel that day and by flipping off scabs in Los Angeles. The drivers deserve better.

Enjoy the remainder of spring!

Villainy and Monstrosity

I was recently drawn into a discussion about the amount of truth in the statement "A villain can be monstrous, but a monster is rarely villainous." It was fun but inconclusive, so I'm using this post to consolidate my argument for how monstrosity and villainy should be defined.

It's important to define the terms first, because "monstrous" and "villainous" are practically synonymous in some contexts. To start with the most contentious, let's define villainy as "a being with the capacity and opportunity for conscious choice choosing to carry out an action which harms unoffending, conscious beings." The important qualities are capacity for choice, opportunity for choice, action, and harm. We're not talking about evil (which may or may not exist) or legality. Captain America, who bashes the snot out of supervillains on the regular, is not a villain. Neither are farmers, as a group. People who fantasize about harming others but never act (in word or deed) on those fantasies do not meet this definition for villainy either. We could dig into what constitutes harm and offense, but let's not.

I'll define monstrosity as anything "animate, supernatural in nature, and having a high capacity for mayhem." Size is usually part of the dictionary definition, and there's a reason "giant __" stories are a subgenre of horror. However, I don't want to exclude the regular-sized-but-still-dangerous creatures (kuchisake-onna, vampires, werewolves, etc.) or the small ones (gremlins, murlocs, animated adamantium mouse skeletons that hunger for human spleens, etc.). Animation is a yes or no disqualifier. Breathing and metabolism count as animation. Scary statues are not monsters. I previously argued that ugliness is a component of monstrosity, but further consideration shows this to be some Western culture nonsense.

Now that we've got definitions, it's easy to see that the first half of the statement is true! A villain (a person who does villainous things when they could do something else instead) can certainly be supernaturally dangerous.

The second half of the statement poses more of a problem. How strong is the correlation between monstrosity and villainy? Nobody pays me to do science, so somebody else can create monstrosity-villainy assessments and assess some non-humans. Keeping in mind that villainy requires 1) multiple options, 2) a capacity for choice, and 3) choosing the most harmful option, here's my expectation for some key results. If you're inclined to argue I encourage you to do it elsewhere, because comments, as usual, are closed.

Further reading:

Achili, J., Alexander, A., Bowen, C., Bridges, B., Carriker, J., Chillot, R., . . . McFarland, M. (2006). Promethean: the created. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf Publishing.
King, S. (2011). Danse Macabre . New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. (2015, November 2). . Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Advance online publication. dx.doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000057